


Missing Data

by Ffwydriad



Category: All New X-Factor, New Mutants, X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Flashbacks, Hunt for Wolverine: Weapon Lost (2018), Hurt/Comfort but not gonna lie the comfort isn't helping much, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Minor Original Character(s), Missing Scene, Other, Polyamory, References to Addiction, Suicidal Thoughts, but im posting it anyway why am i doing this to myself, i feel i should apologize a lot for this fic, uh what else i admit this is mostly angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-22
Updated: 2018-09-22
Packaged: 2019-07-04 16:34:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,159
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15845130
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ffwydriad/pseuds/Ffwydriad
Summary: She takes him back, back to where it all began, back to where it all ended. Back to that gray old house that a part of him will always call home.Doug, following Hunt for Wolverine: Weapon Lost.





	Missing Data

It isn’t a large house, and upstairs especially, it’s what they would call cozy, and it was cozy. in all the meanings of the word, it was soft, and warm, and home. A part of it is still cozy, under the dust and the ruin and the disheveled lack of care. A part of it is still home, will never be anything but, but now, he can’t help but find it tight, like the darkness closing in, like the constricting feeling in his throat. 

Kitty stands by his side, a hand on his shoulder, and they enter together. “Together,” she says, and offers a smile.  _ I am worried what returning to the center of your addiction will do to you _ , she says.  _ I don’t know if I can see my friend in the person you’ve become, and it terrifies me. _

He doesn’t say anything. The wound at his throat gives him an easy excuse as to why, but it’s just that, an excuse. They stand in the doorway for a few moments, as Kitty breathes in a sight that she can only translate in piecemeal, a sight that comes flooding at him like an endless wave, unable to be ignored, forcing itself to be understood.

She goes in to the kitchen, a quick search across countertops and drawers, looking for what needs to go in boxes, to be taken away, and she sends him in to the living room to do the same.  _ I don’t want you near the computers _ , she says, and he is grateful for that, because he still feels that need in his chest, drawing him towards the screens, towards the data that flows in to them, but more than that, there are memories there he isn’t sure he can handle. 

There are memories everywhere, he isn’t sure he can handle. The house is like a ghost, and it screams at him, as he looks through the living room, trying to ground himself, trying to focus on what needs to be done. Everything is missing pieces. He’s thankful, spartan the house is, thankful that they didn’t leave much besides furniture, because the fewer words exist, the easier it is to skip past their meanings.

But there’s enough here, that he can’t take the risk he’ll never come back. No matter how bad an idea it feels, to come back to this place, how it wrenches a hole in his heart, there’s something worse, in these things being left, being taken, being lost.

Each couch, each chair, they’re epics, and he sees their construction, sees the stores they sat in, and  all the jokes and bickering from when they have been bought. He sees the wear of use, each leaving their own imprint, their own mark. He sees their shadow, and he has to look away.

The box is only half full, but he places it by the door anyway, and spends ages taping it up. Anything to try and take his mind off of this. Anything to try and lock it all away. 

Kitty packs up the photographs. He stares at the wall, as they disappear in to a box one by one. They’re all old ones, mostly of the New Mutants, some of X-Factor, a few rare parts tossed in between. The new ones are sitting in a camera, still waiting to be printed out and framed, waiting for something that will never come to pass. 

“I haven’t seen this one before,” Kitty says, holding a picture of him, and Danger, and Warlock.  _ I’m still not used to seeing new pictures of you _ , she says. 

He doesn’t reply. She doesn’t wait for one, and it goes in to the box like all the others, disappearing into the dark.

This is where the story begins, he sees it in their eyes, their faces, in Warlock who was always a more familiar language than his own self, in Danger, a once foreign and confusing assortment of collected languages that took no time to become a fluency, a comforting separation from the rest of the world. He can’t help himself, and he gets lost in it, the way he’s always getting lost in them, until someone brings him down.

He’s sitting in the plane, leaning against the wall, not staring at the closed door, pretending not to stare. Pretending that he’s listening, as his teammates gossip, that he’s focused on them and not the sound of his heart breaking in ways he didn’t know it still could.

They’re still going at it, as the plane lands, as everything wraps itself to a close. He lingers at the doorway, the last one to leave besides them. Someone cracks a joke. He knows it was a joke, can hear it in the inflection, and he knows what it was meant as, the mixture of assurance and mocking, but the words don’t stick in his mind right now. Words themselves don’t matter, too many other languages, other patterns, things that are truer, for better and for worse.

No matter what the joke asserts, he doesn’t wait for them. He heads up to his room and lies down on the bed, staring upwards at the ceiling. His brain tries, as it always does, to find patterns, but it is a pure and empty expanse of white, no trails of paint, no riveted tiles. He doesn’t sleep, but at some point he stops thinking, and these things have become more or less interchangeable, recently.

“Friend Doug?” Warlock asks, peeking his head in to the room. “...I… wish to apologize for previous actions regarding your relationship with Selfsoulfriend Danger.”

“She’s Selfsoulfriend?” Doug asks. The words feel like an electric shock through his entire body, the sort of thing that would make him spasm, would force him to sit up. It doesn’t. He lies there, motionless, except for how quickly his heart is beating, pushing itself up his throat. 

“Soulfriend Danger shares a piece of self’s soul,” Warlock explains, sitting down beside Doug, his head snaking, so that they sit face to face. 

“That isn’t what I meant,” he says. .

“...I… know,” Warlock says.  _ I love her _ , he says. Doug chokes.  _ I love you.  _ “...I… was in a confusing place regarding Danger, and-”

“You don’t have to explain,” Doug says. “You love her. I understand.”

“Self wants to explain!” he raises his voice. “ ...I… was worried that selffriends would enter into a relationship and, and abandon self. But this is exactly what soulfriend Doug is feeling now! ...I… don’t want to leave friend Doug. But do not worry! Soulfriend Danger and ...I… have discussed and Danger agrees that the relationship can be trinary.”

Doug stares at him for a few moments. “Warlock, you can’t just decide for someone-”

“Does soulfriend Doug not want to be in a relationship with self and Danger?” Warlock asks.

“No, I do, I just-” he lies there on the bed, trying to focus on the ceiling again. “Lock, I’m not - I don’t deserve-”

“Friend Doug, Self understands your reticence, but there is nothing that you do not deserve, including love and affection,” he says, grinning. “Do you agree?”

He doesn’t. Not to what directly precedes the question, not to the concept that he deserves love - that is something he understands on a metatextual level but which can’t ever be something so solid as a belief he holds. But the question Warlock poses is of two parts, and the weight is heavily not on this, but on the initial proposal - on the relationship with the pair of them.

“Yes,” Doug says.

Warlock hugs him, tightly, arms coiled around in exuberant glee, and rushes off, with Doug in tow, to tell Danger the good news. 

This is where they stand, at the party, where the team dissolves for good, and the three of them are caught by the photographer. Warlock beams, widely, and his grin stretches off his face. Doug, for his part, has a small, humble smile, and Danger, she smiles too. The language isn’t the same as anyone else there, but he’s learned to read it, and he looks at the shift in her posture, at the way her shoulders hang, at the faint heat, and it translates from her language in to a smile more solidly than any expanse of teeth ever could.

At some point, he starts crafting a word, for the three of them, and he thinks it takes the first of its form here, as they stand, as they plan the first fragments of what is to come.

They’ve made their way upstairs, and he takes a box full of the photographs down, and he can’t  help but linger there, until the pull drags him into the kitchen. 

The computers are all on the floor, several smashed and broken. They were at the kitchen table once, before he’d run out of room, stopped caring about chairs and social conventions and ended up sprawled across the floor. It yells at him, the prints of dust, the marks, the jags, the slight changes in fade, the remnant whispers of where things used to sit, how things used to be. 

Danger is standing in the doorway, leaning against the frame, where she will end up leaving an indent that is hard to see but which his fingers brush over so easily. She is smiling, in all the ways that people who aren’t her smile and none of the ways that are hers, a mocking attempt at sympathy that has no cruelty inside it but which is cruel nevertheless. 

“You need to eat,” she tells him, stiffly. He looks up at her, but he doesn’t stop typing, doesn’t lose focus. 

“I’m already dead,” he reminds her. “I don’t need anything.”

“You are not dead,” Danger corrects. “Your body has been fully restored. The transmode virus may supplement your survival needs, but you must eat, or you will die.”

“Would that be so bad?” he asks. 

“Doug,” she says, and he stands up, grabs something out of the fridge, and sits back down, face illuminated by the screens.

“You’re able to mimic the vocal cadences almost perfectly,” he tells her, “but I can still read the difference. You’ve shut down your emotions.”

“Yes,” she says, and her voice doesn’t bother trying to hide it. 

“Don’t you-” he starts, but the rest of the words don’t come. He scours every language he knows, trying to find a way to express the jumble of thoughts he has, and all he can say is the word he made for them, and it comes out strangled, but it doesn’t matter, she understands. 

“I have not lost the emotion in my memories,” Danger tells him. “I have simply disabled any further emotions from forming.” She pauses, there. “Do not try and convince me to undo this, Doug. I have considered the cost benefit analysis of this action. Nothing is worth that... pain.”

“I know,” Doug says. “I wish I could do the same. I hate you. I hate this.” He isn’t certain what language he’s speaking in, if he opened his mouth, but that has never mattered between them before.

Danger doesn’t say anything. He follows a hundred loose threads to where they form and his translation becomes more solid.

“I’ll decode it,” he tells her. “I’ll find the answer.”

“The internet?” she asks. 

“The universe,” he tells her. “And I’ll make everything better.”

He doesn’t look at her, to read her response. She doesn’t speak. The silence says more than anything else ever could.

Danger isn’t there. It’s Kitty, standing by the doorway, concern clear across her face. A soft hand, and she drags him out, a firm grip, that she hopes will ground him in the present.  _ I don’t want to lose you again _ , she says, and pulls him back. He offers her thanks, a subtle shift, and they stand like that for a few moments, before setting the boxes down.

She leads him back out of the kitchen, up the stairs, to the place he doesn’t want to go. 

It’s dark. Kitty flicks on the light, but now power comes. A pause, she reassures herself - no power means no internet means no for so many things, and she moves forward in the dark. He has no hesitation, and knows he wouldn’t, even if it was as pitch as night, because the hallways a language that he knows so intimately he will never forget them, like the hallways of his childhood home, of the first Xavier school. An imprint wrapped around his heart.

In the bedroom, at least, there is light. He folds his clothes. 

There isn’t much. Warlock and Danger brought little, and they’ve taken all that they had, back to wherever they’ve gone, wherever they’ve left him. He doesn’t remember it, doesn’t remember them leaving, too caught up in his own chosen method of escape. He has even less. He knows that he owns things, but everything is empty. 

Pieces of himself, left abandoned. Nothing was left behind, moving out of Serval, and little was left at the cabin by the cliff, but he knows he brought only what fit in a backpack there, when he moved out, and even then, he’d owned so little. A phone, some clothes, and memories. Before that, he has to imagine that those belongings are long gone, traded and sold and buried in the dirt with the person who he used to be. 

Kitty takes the suitcase downstairs, and he lies on the bed and looks up at the ceiling, wishing it were empty. It isn’t.

There is a mark on the ceiling, a bend, and they are jumping on the bed, and giggling, and Warlock is too, trying to convince him and Danger to join in. The bed wasn’t made for this, creaks and groans, but it’s hard to hear that over the laughing. Warlock hits the ceiling, bending the plaster upwards, chipping up the paint, and he looks so worried, for a moment, before they’re laughing again. 

Their smile has no traces, except for the fact it’s everywhere, in the mark on the ceiling and the creak of the bed and the walls and the floors and the chairs and he sees it everywhere, even when his eyes are shut. He sees the first time he ever saw that smile, held between the three of them.

Kitty’s walking up the stairs, he can hear the way they creak and groan, the way it echoes through the house. Her steps would be quiet, on anything but those steps. She doesn’t have the weight of Warlock or Danger, doesn’t have their energetic speed. 

He doesn’t stand up, doesn’t go back to the drawers, to some pretense of having been working, even though he knows he should. He’s still lying there, staring at the ceiling, and she stands in the doorway, not certain what to do, what to say.

It isn’t hard, to choreograph the starts, what she’s about to say. It’s easier, because he knows Kitty, better than he knows almost anyone, even among the New Mutants. Warlock may be the language he comes back to, but she’s his oldest friend. For a time, she was his only friend.

_ You aren’t leaving here for good _ , she wants to say, to comfort him.  _ You’ll get to come back _ . But she knows, at some level, those aren’t the right words.  _ It’ll be okay _ , she practically screams, even if it’s clear she doesn’t know if she believes it.  _ I don’t know what’s wrong, or how I can make it better, but I’m here for you, Doug, and I want to help, so please, just let me. _

This is what she says instead: “Ready to go?”

He isn’t. Except, that isn’t true, because from the moment he set foot back in here, there’s something instinctual that’s been telling him to run out of there and never look back, because maybe then he might be able to forget, might be able to get rid of the pain. It’s just as matched, however, by the part of him that can’t leave, that wants to stay here, curled up, until the rest of the world dies away, until there’s nothing left.

He stands up, and grabs the last bag, and joins her in the hallway. She smiles, and pretends it isn’t as sad a thing as it looks, and she almost heads downstairs, back to the car, back to the school, when the door catches her eye.

There’s a faint residue of sticker glue, of chipped paint, but in his memory it’s bright and clear, unable to be faded. He can’t move, and so he stands there, frozen, as Kitty reaches for the handle, and then, he’s moving like a flash, can’t stop her fast enough, the bag in his hands falling to the ground. He doesn’t know how loud he screamed out the “NO!” that still echoes in his mind, if it even came out as a sound, but the hand that locks on Kitty’s wrist is just as clear a scream. 

“Doug,” she says, and turns to look at him, calm and clear and overflowing with worry, “what’s in this room?”

He can see what she means.  _ Why don’t you want me to see this? What are you hiding? _ He can read all of the assumptions, things that are secret, things that are bad, worry and that deep shameful interest, that inherent need to uncover what is unknown and right before her.

There’s so many things he could say, truths and lies and avoidances. So many paths, and they all diverge, and he can’t think of anything, not standing right here outside their room, he can’t even stand here, and he slumps to the ground, leaning up against the door. There aren’t any tears, and how can there be? Those wells dried up a long time ago.

For her part, Kitty lets go of all those thoughts, at least for the moment, and everything is turned to him. A hand on his shoulder,  _ I don’t know if I should hug you _ , and she doesn’t wait for a response but holds him tightly. 

“You don’t need to tell me,” she says.  _ I want to know _ , she says.  _ I want you to be okay _ . 

He wants to ask how he’ll ever be okay again.

He doesn’t. He sits there, and he lets himself be held, and he imagines what it would be like, to not hurt anymore.

For her part,Kitty stops talking, or maybe he stops listening, and for what might be seconds and might be ages, they sit there like that, her holding him tightly, silent, listening only to the faint sounds, of wind against the windows, of beams shifting, of pipes creaking, the white noise of a dying house straining to be at peace.

“Come on,” Kitty says, and holds his hand. “Let’s go home.”

It isn’t even a lie when he tells her there’s no place he’d rather be.


End file.
